


by the sores on my feet

by freeal



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-19
Packaged: 2020-01-13 04:45:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18461762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freeal/pseuds/freeal
Summary: A road trip through hell.





	1. seed

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Ida Maria's Devil.
> 
> There's no better time to have another discussion about the cruellest month but this ends up being way too fluffy for my taste. Foolishness.
> 
> Nobody is themselves. Lore is off too.  
> English is not my language and I don't know what I'm doing most of the time.

According to Vergil, now is not the best time to have a road trip across the Underworld.

"Breeding lilacs." He says, left hand resting on Yamato's hilt, smiling that secretive little smile of his, pale eyes sweeping across the landscape like he is the ruler of all this and he's suspecting a coup.

A confused "What?" is all Dante can come up with.

"Breeding lilacs." Vergil merely repeats, offers no explanation. "Out of this dead land." [1]

Vergil speaks just like he smiles, and Dante thinks his brother is enjoying this far too much.

He lifts one dirty boot and digs the heel into the fleshy wound beneath. The demon screeches, arching its back, and struggles violently under their feet, only to be leashed by Dante with a simple twist of the wrist. It whines.

"The fucker is regenerating." Dante looks down at the bloody mess that was the Demon's eyes, pierced by Ebony and Ivory's bullets then leashed with its own snakelike tongue. He lets out a laugh, looking back at Vergil, "It's regrowing its nerves before its claws. Can't say that's the best strategy."

Vergil tilts his head gracefully. "It needs to feel pain before it can fight." He says, "Pain has always been a necessity in survival. Gives us nerves, if you will."

Dante lifts an eyebrow. "That makes sense, I suppose. Anyways." He gestures flippantly, still holding the leash, "If you will do the honour?"

Without a word, Vergil closes his hand around Yamato. There is no movement, no sound. One single blue line splits the air silently. And the ganglion has been carved out, discarded in the wind. Dante can feel the demon goes docile immediately under his hands. It lets out a whimper, sounds almost confused, then starts to run desperately in the direction the leash dictates.

"You poor thing." Dante coos and pats its mutilated horn once. He sits back on the demon's broad shoulder and grins, satisfied.

"Are you actually pitying it, Dante?" asks Vergil, his hand again only resting loosely on the hilt at his side. "A sinful demon with no redeemable quality?"

Dante shrugs. "Well, it was crying like a baby, I would say that's pretty pitiful."

"It is a child, by demonic standards," Vergil says plainly. "Demon spawns need energy to enter metamorphosis. But this one is too weak. Can barely feed itself, let along reserve power in preparing for maturity. " The look he gives Dante is glacial. Cold, dense and passing, obscured in a pair of compressed icy blue. "There is no such thing as sin in the Demon World, but powerlessness might as well be one."

Judge, jury and executioner, Dante thinks to himself. No. His brother fancies himself a practitioner of the law of the jungle. A connoisseur in the art of power. He observes the world with this look in his eyes like he means to understand it. He studies it, dissecting it with cold precision. Then finally he understands, only to break it until he has the world tame and good at his feet.

How different he and his brother are, indeed. Because Dante, Dante needs to break the world around him before he understands it.

He understood himself by being broken.

"I'm gonna name it," Dante says out of nowhere, crossing his arms in exaggerated concentration. "It needs a name, if we are going to ride on its back straight to wherever it is we're going."

Vergil allows his eyes to visit his brother one more time before he returns to keep watch on the deceptively dormant exterior of the Underworld. The hilt of Yamato is cool under Vergil's fingers and its wrapping smooth with years of use. He can see bitter seeds stirring under raw earth, dead roots crawling towards resurrection. The Underworld is holding its breath and does not let go.

"Imma name it Bob." Dante is saying, at last. "It looks like a Bob to me." He nods, shifts in his spots and bumps into Vergil's shoulder, half to annoy him out of habits, half stretching into a yawn.

Vergil doesn't try to pretend that he heard what Dante just said. The Underworld is plotting something but Vergil is weary and Dante tired. They have time. It can wait.

"Sleep, Dante." He says quietly, "There's still a long way for us to go."

 

 

* * *

 

 

Their family home was magnificent. A mansion, in fact. Dante remembers running through a maze of corridors and too many hiding spots. He had lost track of his brother in the library for times he's unwilling to admit.

There was the massive dance hall. Mirrors and chandeliers. Designed to host an entire season of social gossip. It was where Eva would have her balls whenever her whims will it. Not even one of the guest could name her boys but they came anyway, to have the mirrors and the chandeliers. Sounds and music flooded the floor, they vibrated and resonated, growing stronger and bigger as the nights drag on, filling every corner until even the shadows were singing with a hollow delight.

But most of the time it was silent. There were only Eva and Sparda, dancing silently to laughter and music in their heads, alone, in the empty dance hall. 

And then it's just empty and silent. Not even ghosts linger there.

There was the rose garden. 

Eva, with her taste in men, had loved the fieriest and the bloodiest of all roses. She wouldn't compromise, wouldn't plant anything but her rose in the garden soil. Each year when the season came there was a violent onslaught of fragrance, a bed of crimson velvet rippling in April wind, a river of magma and lava flowing through the backyard. And after the fire died down none could substitute. The bleakness of winter must be endured with long walks through dried rose leaves, in the long shadow of the phantom of their heady perfume. Until Spring again arrived.

Between the twins, it was Vergil, not Dante, who had loved Eva's roses. He would sit in the quietest corners in the garden for the longest afternoons, basking in the dripping sunlight, reading songs and proses written hundreds of years ago, ignoring his brother's shouting in the foyer, calling him, to help Dante destroy another batch of ancient curiosities he had found in their father's study. 

But that half of the twin had left the garden a long time ago. It was Dante who inherited their mother's bloody roses. He wears them on his coat and carries them in his blood. He throws roses on his enemies' head and only then is reminded of his mother's laughter instead of her dying cry.

Dante jolts awake to the smell of roses.

There's a pounding rhythm under his back and wind in his hair. The forever gloomy sky of the Underworld looks down expressionlessly. A quiet presence just within touch.

"I had a dream." He says without looking, knowing his brother is listening.

"Good or bad?"

"Don't know." He reaches into his coat and touches the soft petals inside. Almost too soft. The rose has been shrivelling like a fading dream. "Just a dream."

"A memory then."

"Perhaps."

Dante turns his head, finding without surprise that Vergil is looking at him, reading him with distant interest. "Are you going to tell me about it?" He asks.

Dante looks back unflinchingly, and tells himself, one day I will kill him. 

He thinks of this with no menace. Everything has an end and when the end comes, I will kill him and I will bury him with so many roses. 

Dante had buried Vergil before. Too many times. He buried him and he mourned him and the dead was resurrected by a demon lord or a demon sword and then Dante would kill him again. It is a vicious circle.

But when the circle ends, _if_ it ends, Dante thinks he will cover his brother's body with the roses he loved, drown him with this colour of fire and blood and of his heart. He will plant him like a seed——a false hope, really, that something could be bred out of its deathly silence, the paradox of time resolved, _and all manner of thing shall be well._ [2]

He sits up, shaking his head. The scent of the rose has faded completely from his fingertips. 

"Nah. I forgot it already."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot.
> 
> [2] Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot. This line was repeated in the fourth and last poem in the set.


	2. twin

Bob is dead. It rushed headlong into one particularly messy demon ambush on the way, blind and missing half of its brain, got eviscerated immediately by demons tearing their ways through towards the half-demon twins. Dante looked for it for half an hour before Vergil presented him with the tip of Yamato a snakelike tongue fastened as a leash found on the gore-covered ground.

They agreed to continue on foot.

"So now what, we walk?" Dante is already moving, not really putting up much of a fight. "Fine by me, as long as you're sure that we can make it on time."

"We have nothing but time," Vergil says.

"Heh. Time." Dante smirks like he's heard a particularly unfunny joke. "Time time time. Time present and time past, are both perhaps present in time future." Dante intones, doing his best tilted Vergil impression. He pauses for a moment for dramatic effect. "And yes, it was I who stole your precious Eliot." [1]

He winks.

Vergil merely smiles. "I'm impressed, little brother. Care to enlighten me as to where you hid the book?"

"Burnt it," Dante says. "Can't risk you finding it after you made me swear it wasn't me."

"Ah." Vergil breathes. "An appropriate end for a lost prize." He stops for a second to look at Dante, who was falling a few steps behind intentionally. "It was a good book. I do hope that you had the chance to read it over at least once before burning it."

"Well." Dante laughs. He gestures with a jerk of his head. "How far do we have to walk anyway?"

Vergil tilts his head slightly, as if calculating, then says, "I do not know." 

He begins to walk.

Dante stared at the back of his brother's pale head for a full minute before hurries to catch up. "Are you being serious?" He yells and nearly chokes on his own spit. A staccato of laughter is leaking out of him uncontrollably. Dante is ecstatic.

"The Underworld is vast, and its knowledge bottomless," says Vergil, ever so impassively, not looking at his brother's face splitting into a crazy grin. "I have resided here for a long time. The knowledge I've acquired along the way...some of them useful, and some, not so much."

"Let me get this straight. What you are saying is," Dante spits out a lock of hair that just flew into his mouth, "This whole trip thing is not one of your master plans to get rid of me. You are going, just because you want to see it."

The reply comes out almost carelessly. "Correct."

"Who are you and what have you done to my brother?" Dante chuckles softly, combing fingers through his hair, and looks away. Then he's quiet for a long while.

Wordlessly, they walk in tandem.

There's a perpetual copper edge to the air in the Underworld. _Blood_. The source of power and preliminary to madness. Without it, the Underworld will but perish without a whimper.

But that, is quite impossible, for the Dark World is the shadow to the light, and while the light does not live in the mercy of the shadow, as long as there's light, shadows persist.

So humans call it, _Hell_. The inferno of infinite turmoil. A place to fall into if you have half a mind to reject the forever approaching but never arriving Kingdom. 

And oh how they have fallen, chewed alive ravenously, raining crimson nectar on famished soil. They fall and the Underworld rejoices, worshipping their sinful rebellion with teeth and claws.

It's with this humans concocted their cautionary tales. A shadow to their light. It is recorded reverently in their texts, that when they sinned for the first time they fell from Heaven and if they sin some more they would fall further into Hell. It's nice and simple. An explicit hierarchy of moral. An easy discipline to follow.

But there is no such thing as sin in the Underworld. Demons feast on human blood just like humans feast on the flesh of their own lambs. They think of the human world not as what humans think of Heaven, but a Promised Land unreclaimed. The Promised Land of milk and honey, to which they fervently march on under a gluttonous banner, until it too becomes a warm abyss of blood and sulfur.

Vergil understands demons' savage hunger just as well as he understands humans' vulgar hypocrisy, whilst he accepts neither. It would be unwise, to surrender himself to either half of him, as he has witnessed with his own eyes how poorly he would've abided. He would not stand to be _pure_ , to be one thing and not the other. 

He listens, to the dull wind brushing past Yamato's sageo, the distant rustling of grass, and his brother's steady footfalls trailing behind him, not so close, yet never far. He wonders, with only a fragment of his nonchalance, that in his absence, how did Dante come to terms with being an orphan in both worlds. He wonders _does he ever_.

But Vergil does not ask, and Dante will not tell. How time has divided us, brother, he thinks, that we may only unite through our mutual suffering, and even then we suffer silently, our mute scars the remains of our family portrait. It has stared dumbstruck as the fire that is time searing close a gushing wound, and now gazing indifferently at a shroud being pulled over, covering the faces of those that have long been gone.

Vergil thinks of his brother as a ruin, in which every pallid pebble could be the smiling eye that was winking brightly at him, high from the pedestal of a lost paradise, on the statue of his beloved.

Eventually, it's Dante who breaks the brittle ice of silence. "Soooo," He drawls, "When do you think the bigger bullies on the playground will be coming for our lunch money?"

"It matters not. They pose no threat to us," says Vergil. "There are few who can oppose us separately, and none against the two of us."

"So smug," Dante snorts. "If my experiences have taught me anything, is that life fucks you right in the spots where you least expect it to."

"No," says Vergil, like he's certain of this. Like he's one controlling it. "Not here. Not now."

For a moment, Dante believes him.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It occurred to Dante one day that he and Vergil had made a fatal mistake. This revelation sent him into a downward spiral of overindulgence. Impossible missions in the middle of nowhere and dangerous liaisons at the most inopportune moments, leaving only healing wounds on his flesh and irreparable gaps in his mind.

He emerged with a terrible conclusion. Something he simply could not live with.

It was never a secret that Dante and Vergil are different. Identical twins with opposite temperament. How cliché. Everyone had assumed that was the issue. Because it just isn't _right_ , for two souls so similar to be at odds.

But everyone was wrong. They are damned because they had committed a terrible crime before they were even born. A sin, that they would steal half of their brother, their own flesh and blood in their mother's womb.

It is a sin, that half of Dante is demon and half of Vergil is not. The half-demon twins, who had stolen one half of their brother and lost half of themselves, cursed to be judged by one half of their soul, always, no matter where they are and what they do.

It would've been simple and perfect. If only Dante had been all human and Vergil all demon.

I want it back. Dante had muttered vehemently to the ghost in his dreams. Take yours back. I don't want it. I want what is mine. Just take it, now. _Please_.

And then there was a severed glove, an ache in his chest and one half of Dante gone. The half of Vergil in Dante stared at him in the mirror with an accusation on one half of his tongue and a denial on the other.

Dante had learned to live with only half of himself and contented himself with only half of Vergil. It's better than nothing, he kept reminding himself. If they hadn't made that fatal mistake, if Dante had been all human and Vergil all demon, then Dante would have been left with absolute nothing. This had to be enough.

It would be funny, had Dante thought about it then, when he realised that Vergil had split himself in two, one half human and the other half demon, that after all these years Vergil had finally reached the same conclusion as Dante and when he actually did it, his human half had come straight to Dante.

But it was the same moment when Dante saw his brother standing before that magnificent mansion, the illusion of their long lost home falling apart silently around them, half of Dante looking back at him through Vergil's eyes. One half of Dante's heart was filled with longing and thrill and the other half with anger and dread.

So loudly he sighs, holding out both hands to hover over his contradicting heart, "Ut vidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error!"(How I looked, how I languished, how the fatal delusion stole my heart away!)[2]

Vergil sighs, as well, albeit with a lot less enthusiasm. "What is it now, Dante?"

"It's a poem I know for a fact you haven't read."

"Enlighten me then."

Dante hums, then gives his brother a lopsided grin. "I don't think so."

Vergil sighs again. "It's almost too easy for me to retaliate, brother. You have chosen the wrong arena." He says, a lofty look high on his brow. "But I will commend you for your effort."

"Hey, can't a guy picks up a new hobby or two? You might be in for a surprise." Dante smiles lazily, not falling for Vergil's deliberate condescension, "After all, it can get pretty boring waiting for the next big fuck-up this place has in store."

"I would imagine, that out of all the options in the world, literature is not a priority on your list."

Dante laughs darkly, "So you do imagine, huh?" He spats, glare obscured by the white curtain of his hair, "What I do, how I live, while you're off whipping the world around hoarding power?"

Something on Vergil's sculpted contour shifts—a fickle smile, flashing across his lips like a miniature lightning, then Dante is shocked to his core. 

After all these years, he thinks bitterly. But this tang on his tongue, this sting in his spine, they are his own. No amount of separation and animosity can take away this feeling from him. And he thinks it will be enough. It _has_ to be.

"I need not imagine, as I simply know." His brother is saying, bowing his head just scantly, "Quanto la cosa è più perfetta, più senta il bene, e così la doglienza." (The more a creature is perfect, the more it perceives the good, and likewise, pain.)[3]

Dante can't help but closes his eyes, and whispers without heat, "You are such a competitive asshole."

Vergil blinks, unaffected by his brother's crude words. Then he says, carefully, "Have you considered, Dante, that this is more of an exile to you, than to me?"

Dante merely waves. "What you call exile, I call a vacation. You wouldn't believe the debt I was in." He shrugs. "Come on. It's not so bad. Though I'd admit the entertainment here is a bit...singular. But I'm a simple guy. I could always use more. I've lived on less."

Vergil looks at him and knows that he speaks truth. Falsehood is beneath the sons of Sparda, but Dante has a talent for trickery. He lies with understatements and alternate contexts. He would swallow a mouth full of blood and spit out paintings of roses, then ask Eva for sweet compliments and a kiss on the forehead.

Dante doesn't appreciate it when someone asks what has happened and how badly he's hurt.

Vergil can respect that.

So Vergil simply speaks on. "You will be able to find a way out of here, as long as you look."

Dante clicks his tongue loudly. "Don't think about getting rid of me so soon, Vergil. I'm not stuck with you. _You_ are stuck with _me_."

"True," Vergil admits. "But it will serve you well to remember it. "

Dante is still pondering whether it sounds more like a warning or a threat when Vergil stops at a ledge overlooking a large expanse of stark white grass and sanguine dirt. The wind has stopped at some point. Around them, the Underworld is eerily silent. There is something heavy and brooding on the horizon.

"We are just on time," Vergil says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot. First line of the poem.
> 
> [2] Virgil's Eclogues, Book 8. [Source of translation](https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=5g8-AQAAMAAJ&lpg=PA39&dq=ut%20vidi,%20ut%20perii,%20ut%20me%20malus%20abstulit%20error&hl=zh-CN&pg=PA39#v=onepage&q&f=false).
> 
> [3] Dante's Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto 6. Translation by Robert Pinsky.
> 
> It's my strange little headcanon that Dante doesn't read Dante and Vergil doesn't read Virgil. They were in their original texts because of brotherly flexing, I have no idea what they sound like. Just read the translation.


	3. time

Suddenly, the Underworld exhales.

It's like a drop of ink in water. A pregnant seed devoid of season, forever suspending in the moment before the first drop of spring rain hits the ground. An uninterested dark eye with a blind stare, turning its back on this cruel world.

The black sun of the Underworld, aloof, uncaring.

Vergil exhales, as well.

Dante is tapping his foot lightly with a bored look bare on his face. But Vergil knows Dante is watching him. There's alert in Dante's body, in the way his fingers close slightly around the air, how his shoulder is set and legs parted.

"Well. I was gonna say that thing is black as hell but Hell's definitely not that dark," says Dante, squinting a little. "What is that thing? A solar eclipse?"

"A naturally occurring power vacuum." says Vergil, "A black hole, for the lack of a better term."

Lightly, Dante whistles, shifting weight to another foot, "Sounds cool. But what does it mean?" He scratches a side of his nose while adding, "And how?"

Vergil inclines his head gently, still looking up at the black sun. "There is little record on its occurrence. From what I've gathered, to a world built entirely on power, it's perfectly useless."

"Useless. Right." Dante smirks. "So this is the thing you've come all the way to see, isn't it. Well, now you've seen it. What now? What's next?"

"There's no next." Vergil says, allowing marvel to seep into his voice, "As there is no now. Because there's no time. As I said, it's a vacuum. A vacuum that does not exist in the linearity that is our time."

Vergil lowers his head and goes still. He looks, and he listens. 

The constant starved whispers in the wind have stopped. The air smells tepid, lacks its usual sharpness. No pathetic creatures limping on top of fragile skeletons. No chattering, shifting, wailing, sneaking, jabbering, chewing, struggling. Nothing at all, to take away from the lightless glory of the Underworld's new regent.

There is no movement. There is no sound.

At the further end of the ledge, Dante is still processing. It's not a good look on him. Dante is used to accepting the world as it is. Go with the flow. He thrives on spontaneity, but flounders in sober speculation.

"But how long this is going to... _Wait_." Dante narrows his eyes, and thinks for a second. He grimaces. "What?"

Vergil merely shakes his head. "Save your strength, Dante." He says coolly, "You won't find an explanation in time," then turns on his heels to walk away.

He knows this only because he had tried.

Aimlessly, Vergil begins to walk towards the grass field underneath. He lets his thumb brushes past the golden relief at the end of Yamato's hilt, and thinks about where he would rather be at this moment. He finds that he doesn't care. Space is the least of Vergil's concerns, because Sparda, with his stoic wisdom, had left Vergil with a blade that can cut through space, but never bothered to teach him what to do with time.

Time has slipped through his fingers like ashes. Has it been thirty years already? It seems as if just yesterday he had abandoned the ruin of their family's once-glorious Eden, to step on this road of empty promises and endless pursuit. So many years in a blur, trapped in a corrupted cage designed fiendishly by Mundus, then the decaying cage of himself, a cruel joke told carelessly by time.

 _Time_. Time the tyrant. Time the destroyer. Time who drained away Dante's eternal summer and cast more winter over Vergil's heart. What Vergil wouldn't do to remit its destructive influence. He followed a fable he read once in a book, and there he is, miraculously pardoned from the lifelong sentence, if but for a moment.

Yet he feels no relief. His frustration persists stubbornly, eating gruesomely at his innards and left him feeling hollow.

"You okay there Vergil? Looking a little constipated." Dante says, still trailing behind him, feigning concern. "A bit of exercise will do you plenty good, or so they say in the commercials." He flashes a sly grin. "Come, let's fight a little, take the edge off, huh?"

Vergil frowns. "And why would I do that?"

"It's all we ever do." Dante says, the demon sword already materialising in his hand, "The only way we've ever known to coexist."

So they fight. In this rift within time, where nothing moves. There is no warmth to blood and no meaning in tears. Vergil's frustration translates only into errors and miscalculations. He dashes and he strikes and he slices, leaving a trail of fresh cuts in his wake and receiving three times the amount in return. His blood tastes like nothing and Dante is flashing hither and thither effortlessly, smiling.

His brother's smile is not what it used to be, he thinks numbly as Dante's sword entering his chest and exiting at the other side. It used to be bright like the afternoon sun and sweet like a blooming rose. Then, it was as sharp as his metal and as raw as his youth. But now, bearing the arbitrary imprints of time, Dante's smile is a cryptic amalgam, a mystery refusing to be unravelled. Vergil sneers in pain. How time has divided them, even a simple smile is too distant for him to capture.

Don't look back at the ruin. Vergil tells himself. Don't prod open old wounds. The merciless march of time scorns those who wallow in time past, who dawdle in time present, who loiter in time future. It's simply the mechanism of the world. A definitive track of life, on which mere mortals toil from birth to death. Be still, and wait without hope. [1]

But how tiresome this life can be. Observing and studying and understanding, only to be herded by a vis major so powerful, even the two of them stand no chance of opposing.

Vergil thinks of himself as a ruin, in which, if its decayed vestige is left unattended, pestilent nightmares will spread like a disease, blighting the very earth it once proudly stood upon.

Later, when sweat is drying on their skin and smaller wounds healed without a trace, they sit side by side below the ledge, gazing pointlessly at the unblinking black eye on the grimy sky.

"You know, it was starting to feel like that time you caught a nasty cold when we were little kids," Dante says, fingers playing idly at the lining of his coat. "Not gonna lie. Still feels really good taking advantage of you."

Vergil exhales into the stagnant air before him. His brother has the most annoying mouth whenever he's feeling smug.

"Okay, fine, not _that_ bad." Dante is still talking, not minding receiving no response from the target of his tease. "Just admit that you're an old man now and rest a little when you need to. No shame in that. Besides," He nods solemnly before speaking, "I won't stab you in your sleep. Promise."

"Sleep is not necessary," Vergil says, blinking slowly. "Only a waste of time."

"But you can, if you want to." Dante points out, "Time doesn't even move here. You have hardly anything to lose."

And in that, Dante is correct.

This is why I came, Vergil reminds himself. To seek respite away from the unforgiving flow of time. To salvage lost treasures from the ruin of scars. All time is unredeemable. But for a rare moment, by an impossible chance, here they are, there it is. No past, no present, no future. [1]

The suspended air of the Underworld feels heavy and languid in his lungs. Dante is weary and Vergil is tired. He will rest now, just for a second, when the judgemental time is turning a blind eye.

Time time time. Vergil thinks as he closes his eyes. Ridiculous the waste sad time, stretching before and after. [1]

 

 

* * *

 

 

Vergil wakes to the smell of roses.

The stillness in the air has dissipated and the black sun was gone. There is a faded rose on his chest and Dante is nowhere to be seen.

Vergil closes his eyes again. He had missed this. A quiet moment with only the scent of roses, oblivious to the outside world, unburdened momentarily.

There had always been an understanding, between Vergil and Sparda, that for him as the older brother and the cool-headed twin, what kind of role Vergil's supposed to take on. One he accepted without complaint.

It had been easy, for Vergil to understand the lines around his father's mouth and shadows under his eyes. He had realised at a very young age that he had Prometheus for a father, who rebelled against his own kin and defected to the Human World, securing a spark of flame in his hands, without ever looking back. [2]

He knows that he didn't look back when he walked out of the gate for the last time. And Vergil admires him for that.

But his mother is Sisyphus, forever toiling away in the hopeless cycle of her futile labour. Each year she bred roses out of the April soil, watching them burn in the brightest and fervidest colour, only to have them grey and lifeless around her feet, and to do it all over again. The ruthless seasonal cycle of death and rebirth.

It puzzles Vergil, Eva's undying patience, which outlived even Sparda's stubbornness, after his flame had inevitably died down. Round and round she walked in winter's garden, chasing another year's roses, another slow dance surrounded by mirrors and chandeliers.

Time is the fire and Eva let the fire burn, its warm flame lulling her to sleep in silent and empty nights, with the intoxicating incense of burnt rose leaves.

How different his parents were, indeed, Vergil muses. It's almost a miracle, for them to love instead of hate, to reach a truce between one life existing on a line and the other in a circle.

And his brother has brought him this rose. A spectre summoned from the past as well as the future. It's the smiling eye behind the foliage, whenever Dante saw him hiding in the rose garden, but didn't approach.

Vergil picks up the dying rose gingerly and inhales its faint fragrance. This is the smell of his mother's time, where every beginning was an end. How desperately a rose lives, he thinks, lives to die and to live again, to burn at the expense of itself like Ouroboros eating its own tail, before time veering its ugly head. 

What is rose then if not fire. It's the flame that preserves instead of destroying. Time past and time future, contained in the fleeting time present. A truce between transience and eternity.

Vergil is recalled from his contemplation by a flapping of wings. It's Dante, streaking across the sky in his volcanic demon form, burning like a true sun.

"Where did you go?" Vergil sits up and says, not quite raising his voice.

The molten demon circles in the air for a while longer before landing and transforming into his usual white-haired self. Dante stretches contently, cracking a few joints, then starts to walk towards Vergil with a spring in his heels, spreading his hands, "Why, brother, I went hunting, of course."

Vergil has noticed. There's fresh blood on Dante's face and a glint in his eyes. Somehow he looks younger, unvarnished. Smooth edges roughed and raw, moving with more brash defiance than his causal veneer.

Vergil wants to ask _what time is it_ but does not.

Abruptly, Dante's brisk march stops. 

He licks his lips hesitantly, scratching the stubbles on his chin. "Oh yeah. That. " He says, voice still hoarse with adrenaline, "Just an ordinary flower. No funny business," He smiles a little, "Smells good though."

Vergil looks down at the rose, holding it delicately with his hand. 

"Yes. Of course." Thoughtfully he says.

Vergil studies the rose for one last moment, stands up, dusting himself off meticulously with cool efficiency, then moves elegantly in long strides to Dante. 

He doesn't stop until he's in Dante's personal space, basking in his warmth, the intangible smell of roses lingering in the breath they share. He touches one drop of blood smeared on Dante's jawline, sniffs it once, then spreads it on his brother's slightly parting lips.

Dante's gasp sounds like the first stanza of a poem, and his lips taste quite like the last.

Vergil is exploring Dante like a ruin. Revisiting every corner he once knew. Turning every stone, pushing open every door, to find the small road leading to the backyard, where the frost of winter has yet to thaw.

Will time ever permit a truce, between Dante's neverending cycle and Vergil's unretreating path? But if time would be so unkind, then he will plant this kiss in Dante. He will make Dante his rose garden, preserving an insignificant loop of time of him murmuring poetry close to his brother's lips, with each year's roses burning every word into his existence, echoing over and over again.

Dante sighs, feeling soundless words being tattooed into him by Vergil's tongue sliding against his own and teeth nipping at his lips. Incandescent electricity is running wildly in him. This is how a kiss should feel like. To devour a little piece of Vergil while reclaiming a little piece of himself. It feels _right_ , that each one of the two has something the other wants, while wanting something from the other in return. This is how they exist now. This is how they have ever existed.

In the far back of his head, where Vergil's tongue cannot reach, Dante is still thinking about how pale his brother looks against the colour of the rose. So many years in cloak and shadows, his skin has forgotten the warm caress of the human sun. Dante will forget about it too, eventually, if he stays here with Vergil long enough. It will probably take them another thirty years, before they again become one and the same. A cycle completed.

And all manner of things shall be well.

One kiss melts into another, until kiss itself is no longer enough. Biting and clawing and pushing and pulling. Insatiable hunger. Memory and desire. [3]

And then, again they fight. This time, it ends with Dante being pinned steadfast on the ground, legs anchored by the taut weight of Vergil and a scabbard branding across his back. Yamato pierces through fluidly between his third and fourth metacarpus then nails the hand there too, blinking apathetically at Dante's predicament.

Dante is laughing now, sounding no less maniac than that time he suggested starting a fire in their father's study, just to make Sparda come to his precious trinkets' rescue from the other end of the mansion, to again see the pretty blue light Yamato makes when it slices through space and distance.

How ludicrous, Vergil thinks to himself, then smiles at his own madness of playing the complicit, drawing the blade slowly and steadily from Dante's hand. The wound was already closing. There will be no scar left.

Vergil waits until Dante's laughter has died down, then lets him roll over and rests on his back. The rose has fallen to the side a long time ago, scattered like drops of dried blood.

"He giveth and he taketh away." Dante snickers, still breathing harder than necessary. "It's gotten pretty disgusting anyway."

"Where did you get it?" asks Vergil, taking a knee beside Dante, left hand resting on the other.

"Some evacuated flower shop on the way," says Dante. He frowns innocently, "What? I don't even have a backyard."

Vergil snorts, picks up a fist full of withered petals, and dumps them all at once on Dante's face.

Dante welcomes it with his own brand of mirthful abandon. He blows at one of them, and looks at it slowly descending with Vergil.

Long after that petal has landed, Dante says, eyes closed beneath a few strands of white hair, "What were you dreaming about?"

"I do not dream," says Vergil dryly. "Dreams are mutated memories. They have no use to me."

"But you were dreaming." Dante insists.

He does not say, I wonder do you dream about the same thing as I do. Do you dream of me, and our every painful reunion. Do you dream of things you shouldn't have known or never have owned. 

He does not say it's not enough, to have only Dante's half of time but not Vergil's. To have his future but not the past.

He does not say and it's up to Vergil to ask.

Vergil's lips are pressing into a harsh line. The barely visible cold pale line that shows itself for but a split second on the horizon, before the dawning begins. "Why does it matter?"

"Because we don't have all the time in the world," Dante says, as if it should be obvious, and Vergil should be able to understand.

He does.

"This will not change anything." He says mildly, easing into a more comfortable position, looking down at his brother flat and relaxed on the ground.

"Tell me anyway," says Dante.

Vergil pauses. There is a curious blankness on his face. Like he has made up his mind. Like he is ready to give up something and knows what he wants in return.

"I dreamt of walking through an empty place." He says, " There is nothing there and I'm tired. There's nothing else to do and I have to go."

Dante arches an eyebrow, smiles, and thinks about how there was a time, when he could just break into tears like this.

 

 

End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot.
> 
> [2] Actually, Prometheus was also punished with an eagle eating his liver every day. 
> 
> [3] The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot.

**Author's Note:**

> Now that I'm thinking about it, I should've touched on reincarnation along with the hell rant somewhere in the second chapter, and written more about Bob, and made this thing four chapters because there're four seasons, and "Four" "Quartets". And bloody _**April**_. 
> 
> Ugh.
> 
> Have a listen at the recomposition of Vivaldi's Four Seasons by Max Richter, especially "summer 1", if you got the chance. And thank you so much for reading. 
> 
> 如果有说中文的朋友看到这儿：很抱歉我也不知道为什么。生活真是充满惊喜和存在主义危机。


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